Drawing Environment -- What Paper Does Well
Recognition and parsing are only part of the story -- the "intelligent" part. But a drawing system must also do the things that traditional paper is good at. So we support making and managing drawings.
With real drawing media, you control the color, texture, tone, and thickness of your line by controlling the speed, bearing pressure, wetness, and other characteristics of your drawing instrument. In the Cocktail Napkin the drawing instrument converts pressure and pen color to an output ink darkness and color. For example, with a 'brush', the harder you press, the thicker and darker your line.
Tracing Paper
Designers use tracing paper for different purposes. It allows you to try different shapes and positions, by copying from a lower layer, making small changes as you copy. Tracing sheets can be translated and rotated, which helps you look at different relative positions and orientations. And tracing paper lets you keep a record of previous design options, a way to track design history and versions.
The Electronic Cocktail Napkin provides "tracing paper". With the tabs (lower right of drawing) you select and move layers. You can copy from a lower layer to the top layer, and you can remove a layer of trace and put it aside. It appears as a small icon along the top.
Selection, Dragging, and Resizing
Although it breaks the metaphor, you can select elements by tapping them quickly and move them about, or select their handles and stretch or squeeze them. You can select more than one element by drawing a circle around the elements and drawing a "pick" command glyph.
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